Mutant1: Awakening Lucas
by Mapu
Summary: Series Crossover: seaQuest and XMenmovie. Lucas develops a mutation and the seaQuest crew react badly. Lucas' point of view. Note: It is NOT necessary to know anything about XMen.


# Mutant  
Awakening: Lucas

#### by Mapu

_I don't own the seaQuest crew or the X-Men. I just play with them. This is the first of my Mutant series and is a crossover between seaQuest season 1 and X-men (the movie). Each story in the series is told from more than one point of view. Thankyou, Donna, for the edit of this story._

Lucas kicked aimlessly at his chair leg with the heel of one well-worn boot as he waited for the announcement that his bus was ready for boarding. His stomach churned uncomfortably, he tried to ignore it and the accompanying pang of hunger that called for his attention. He had limited success, and it didn't help him much that the big guy on the bench opposite kept dipping into a bag of crisps... Tomato flavored, Lucas guessed, from the smell. Not his favorite, but the spicy scent of the snack still made his mouth water. He tried to remember the last time that he'd eaten a real meal ... day before yesterday ... or was it the day before that? He wasn't sure, but it had been a while. 

Lucas fervently wished he had enough money left to get something to eat, but the money that he'd acquired had been barely enough to pay the bus fare. Lucas knew he could get more money if he had to, but he didn't like doing it. It was dangerous to use his power in public and no matter how desperate he was the stealing still made him uncomfortable. He did it only when he had no other choice and his need profound enough. 

Getting himself out of New Cape Quest unseen was important, far more to him than food. It was unlikely that he would be spotted in such a large city but even the small chance wasn't one he was willing to take. He knew it was possible he was overreacting, but he'd learned the hard way that it didn't hurt for people like himself to be extra cautious. 

It had been good fortune that he'd found out in time that the seaQuest had arrived in port. On his way to the beach to spend some time near the ocean, he'd spotted the three-day-old newspaper proclaiming the famous vessel's approach. The boat as due to arrive that day, after the successful completion of its tour. 

The paper stated that the crew would be granted the liberty of the city for the month the vessel underwent a refit. He knew the crew; within hours of being granted liberty they would be spread out over the entire city... no where would be safe for him. It would be his luck that he would walk right into Kreig, Ford, or even worse, the captain... he could not let that happen. 

How could he face the captain after what had happened and what he'd done to the man? Lucas gazed at the grainy photograph of the captain he had carefully torn from the newspaper article. The photo didn't do him justice but Lucas couldn't stop looking at it. Had the captan forgiven him or did he hate him like everyone else? It was a question Lucas was too afraid to have answered. If he didn't know for sure, he could pretend the man still cared. Carefully folding the image Lucas put it away deciding that it really was best he didn't know. Seeing the fear and hatred from the crew had been bad enough ... seeing it in the captain would be impossible to bear. 

Lucas tried to imagine what it would have been like to arrive back in port with the rest of the crew, a hero of the UEO. There would be the end of tour party... Krieg as morale officer would have planned it. Lucas felt a momentary pang of regret at the thought of the fun and friendship he was missing, and part of him wondered what would happen if he did let someone from the boat see him. Fortunately it was a small voice, and a louder saner one urged him to run. 

He shook his head and schooled his thoughts to be calm. He couldn't afford IT to happen and he always seemed to loose his control when he got upset. 

He thought back with a visible shudder to the first time IT had happened. The day Lucas Wolenczak had died and he had been born. 

It was hard for him to believe it had not even been six months ago. He'd been sixteen and happy for the first time in his life. There had been people who had truly cared about and for him ... a feeling he had almost forgotten. He should have known, expected it, to end, but instead he'd lived as though he had all the time in the world. What a fool he'd been. 

The day it happened had been a terrible day... the seaQuest had been in severe trouble, and Lucas had rushed to the bridge where he knew he'd find the means to ease his fear. The captain's calm presence always seemed to make even the most dangerous situations survivable. That time it had been different. The seaQuest was a remarkable boat, crewed by the best in the UEO. But even that combination had limits. Being attacked by six advanced and heavily armed vessels in a coordinated surprise attack had proved to be the seaQuest's limit. The boat was hit, hard, before they had known they were under an attack. 

Lucas stood behind Ortiz on the upper deck and gripped the sensor console tightly as the tension rose. The badly damaged boat listed heavily to port as the crew had tried their best to escape the unexplained conflict. 

Beside him, Ortiz called out a warning "Incoming contact... range 500 meters... two targets." 

He heard the high pitched whine of the incoming torpedo attack and looked up, directly into the captain's apologetic eyes. 

"All quarters brace for impact. Mr. O'Neil, send a mayday to the UEO. Report our position," Bridger had ordered. Lucas swallowed hard as he realized reporting the seaQuest position was all they could do. There was nothing left to fight with. 

The collision alert sounded and the captain calmly sat in his command chair, his eyes still locked on Lucas. Lucas wanted to show the same courage in the face of the imminent death but couldn't, his fear and the stress of the moment gripped him tightly. All around the bridge Lucas watched his friends preparing to meet their deaths silently and his mind screamed, "Nooo." His terror mounted by the moment until it exploded in his mind. 

Something changed, with a blinding flash of intense pain a new awareness came over him. Abruptly he understood ... everything. He could for the first time feel how it all fit together, not just the ship he stood on, but the water that surrounded it and the torpedoes that streaked though it toward them. He understood it all. He could feel it at its most basic level, he could see the pattern of the elemental forces that bound the matter together... and he knew he could change that pattern at will. 

A cold fire washed through his body with a white-hot flame as he called the power into himself and through the intense pain reached out and touched the incoming warheads. It was difficult, harder than anything he'd ever done, but he managed to change the pattern of the forces binding the explosive material together. The torpedoes were no longer a danger. He felt them impact harmlessly against the ship's hull and disintegrate into metallic fragments. Through his hands, Lucas could feel the pattern of the seaQuest and the places where that pattern had been corrupted by battle damage. As he concentrated on each section he could feel it correcting itself. It didn't take long before the seaQuest pattern began to resemble what Lucas instinctively knew it should look like. As each new system was repaired a wave of pained exhaustion shook through him, he couldn't continue; it hurt too much. He began to struggle against the power ... trying to let it go, but found he couldn't. 

He distantly heard the captain's concerned voice call to him but caught up in the vortex of energies swirling through his mind had been unable to answer. Suddenly, the power left him and he fell to his knees. He breathed a deep sigh of relief and stood shakily to his feet again, feeling dazed and exhausted. 

Lucas glanced around the suddenly still room. No one moved ... all of the bridge crew stared open-mouthed in his direction, except for Commander Ford who knelt next to the unmoving captain. Confused, Lucas had looked to Ortiz and made a small gesture in his friend's direction. Ortiz had reacted by backing away from him, fear striking from his dark eyes. 

Lucas had wanted to ask what was wrong, but Commander Ford spoke first. "Lucas, what have you done?" he demanded. 

Until that moment Lucas hadn't realized he had caused the captain's injury, and the realization shocked him. The captain lay unmoving on the deck, his eyes wide open. At first Lucas thought the Captain was dead, until he noticed, with relief, the slow rising and falling of his chest. He shook his head in denial, he didn't know what had happened ... it was all so confused. Unable to stand the shocked and alarmed eyes of his friends any longer, Lucas ran from the bridge. 

Lucas tore down the hall, his boots pounding on the metal deck as he ran, he ran until he reached his room and slammed the hatch closed. Dumfounded, he stood still in the middle of his cluttered room trying to get a grip on the events of the last few minutes. He realized with growing dread that his life had just changed ... that nothing was ever going to be the same again. 

He felt grief welling up ... it felt as though someone he love had just died, he knew the captain wasn't dead but the feeling remained. At last, he understood ... it was himself - he had died. His life as Lucas Wolenczak, the teenage member of the seaQuest crew was over, in an instant he had become Lucas, the mutant monster. 

He knew about mutants, he'd heard the rumors and, he'd stumbled across secret government reports on several of them during a few hacking adventures. In the back of his mind he known it was a possibility, every teenager did, but he'd never really considered the prospect. He had thought he was safe... he'd turned sixteen with no sign of a mutation. "No!" he yelled angrily into the silence, it wasn't happening ... it just couldn't be happening. 

Lucas glanced around the small untidy room, at all of his things; none of it looked real anymore. His open computer sat where he'd left it that morning, the unfinished security program still displayed on the screen's cold surface. A few hours before Lucas had been immensely pleased by the progress of that program. He'd found a new way to compress the code so that it was a lot smaller and vastly more powerful. As soon as the new system was finished, Lucas had planned to surprise Chief Crocker with it, but now he could see the program for what it really was ... an aberration. ... an electronic freak ... something that had no right to exist. He cut the power to the screen, blacking out the offending code but he couldn't bring himself to delete it. It wasn't the program's fault it was the way it was. 

A sudden sense of intense loneliness swept through him in the empty room, and he needed to find someone to talk to. Normally, when something bothered him he would find Kreig or Tim or sometimes the Captain to talk to, but that wasn't an option this time. He'd seen their faces; their mouths open in shocked horror and the way Ben had backed up slightly as he'd passed. 

Unable to face that kind of revulsion from his friends, Lucas knew there was only one member of the crew left he could talk to. Not ready to see any of the crew at all, Lucas pried the cover off the ventilation duct and crawled inside. Using the ventilation ducts took a lot longer than normal, but he was guaranteed not to run into any other crew on his way to the seadeck. He opened the grill behind the moonpool, climbed out, automatically dusting himself off. Apart from Darwin, he was alone in the huge room. Darwin's gray head broke the surface. "Lucas," the animal cried happily. 

"Hey, Darwin. I need to talk. Is that okay?" Lucas asked his friend. 

"Talk," the dolphin agreed. 

"Darwin, something has happened to me. I've changed," Lucas explained his problem. 

"Good change?" Darwin asked hopefully. 

"No, Dar. It's a bad change... a very bad change. I'm ... I'm a mutant... I'm not human anymore," Lucas admitted. 

Darwin gazed at the boy for sometime before speaking, "Same Lucas." 

"That's just it, Darwin, I'm not the same Lucas I was yesterday. I'm someone ... something else. I have this power. I can make things happen. I ... I didn't mean to, but I hurt the Captain with it. I couldn't stop it and everyone is afraid of me. I don't know what to do." 

"Do nothing ... wait," Darwin advised his frantic friend. 

A noise from the corridor sent Lucas scurrying for cover behind a large equipment cabinet, out of sight. Two crewmen entered the room and began looking around. Lucas drew back into the deeper shadows. 

"Damn, I thought for sure the little freak would be here," one loud voice complained. 

"I'm glad it's not here ... I don't know what Ford expects us to do with it when we find it. I heard the little mutant attacked the captain and just about killed him," the second voice spoke. 

Lucas closed his eyes at the pain the words brought. 

"Come on, let's go, he's not here. He's probably still hiding out in the ventilation ducts... they found the grill off in his room," the first voice said. 

The two men turned to leave, and as they did the second speaker said coldly, "I always knew there was something strange about that kid ... just never expected it to turn into a mutie." 

Lucas stood; his legs trembling from the force of his emotions... just below the surface he could feel the same power he'd felt on the bridge begin to stir. A wave of exhaustive weakness washed over him as he fought it down and he leant against the edge of Darwin's pool to recover, the power vanishing as quickly as it had come. The dolphin surface nearby and Lucas ran a shaking hand down the animal's back. "I know what I have to do now, Darwin. I have to go," Lucas told his friend sadly. 

Darwin shot a small blast of spray into the air. "Men wrong ... Lucas stay." 

Lucas stood back from the pool. "I'll never forget you, Darwin," he said quietly as he backed toward the ventilation duct again. He took a long last look at his only remaining friend then climbed back into the small tunnel and began to make his way to the launch bay. He knew they were looking for him in the shafts but it was still the most inconspicuous way to his destination. 

Stealing the launch turned out to be difficult. He crawled out of the ventilation duct silently, and made his way to one of the docking bays. Lucas knew he was out of options and out of time, so he decided to make a desperate dash for the launch bay door, passing right by the guard. Jumping up from his cover, Lucas raced at top speed for the airlock. He didn't think he was going to make it but the guard had been so surprised and frightened of him that he had leapt away rather than toward him. The guard's actions had been a surprise to him but the real shock came a moment later when a vicious burning sensation streaked across his upper arm. 

Lucas cried out in pain, his body landing hard against the wall. Beside him, imbedded deeply in the metal plating, was the bullet the panicked guard had fired at him. His blood welled out in bright blobs from the deep gash the bullet had left behind and dripped through the fingers of the hand Lucas clamped over the wound to splatter onto the metal deck. Lucas stared in transfixed terror, his eyes very wide, at the gun barrel pointed toward him, waiting for the final flash of light that would end his life. It didn't come, instead the barrel slowly lowered. The spell broken, Lucas leapt forward and yanked the closing lever downward. 

In moments he was free of the seaQuest and had begun his life as a mutant on the run. 

A clock chiming on the wall of the transit center brought Lucas back to the present and he rubbed absently through the material of his shirt at the thick scar that ran across his upper arm. It was a lasting souvenir from his escape of the seaQuest. He remembered a time when he'd thought having a scar would be great but after having gone through the pain of collecting a few he no longer wanted them. 

The video screen on the wall near the clock caught Lucas' attention when it began to display the welcoming ceremony for the seaQuest crew. He watched the captain mount the few steps to the podium and shake the mayor's hand as he accepted the liberty of the city for the crew of the seaQuest. Lucas smiled wistfully; the captain looked well ... every bit the proud captain of the UEO's finest. 

Several of the senior staff filled the chairs behind the captain, serious expressions on their faces, as they listened to the Mayor's self-serving speech. Lucas felt gratified that everyone appeared to be well, they were good people and he didn't blame any of them that they hadn't been able to accept the sudden change in him. It had taken time but he had at last come to accept himself for what he really was. He was a mutant, and mutants had no past - they couldn't afford them. 

Lucas stood when his bus number was announced over the transit speakers. Slinging the ratty, nearly empty, duffel bag over his thin shoulder, he left without another glance at the vid screen. His life on the seaQuest was over and there was no going back to it. 

***   
AUGUST 2000


End file.
